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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (精装)
by Malcolm Gladwell
| Category:
Non-fiction, Decision-making, Psychology |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
MSL price:
¥ 258.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Written in a forthright and conversational style, this book is an enlightening piece of work providing insight into the human brain. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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Donna Seaman, Booklist (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Gladwell writes about subtle yet crucial behavioral phenomena with lucidity and contagious enthusiasm. His first book, The Tipping Point (2000), became a surprise best-seller. Here he brilliantly illuminates an aspect of our mental lives that we utterly rely on yet rarely analyze, namely our ability to make snap decisions or quick judgments. Adept at bridging the gap between everyday experience and cutting-edge science, Gladwell maps the "adaptive unconscious," the facet of mind that enables us to determine things in the blink of an eye. He then cites many intriguing examples, such as art experts spontaneously recognizing forgeries; sports prodigies; and psychologist John Gottman's uncanny ability to divine the future of marriages by watching videos of couples in conversation. Such feats are based on a form of rapid cognition called "thin-slicing," during which our unconscious "draws conclusions based on very narrow 'slices' of experience." But there is a "dark side of blink," which Gladwell illuminates by analyzing the many ways in which our instincts can be thwarted, and by presenting fascinating, sometimes harrowing, accounts of skewed market research, surprising war-game results, and emergency-room diagnoses and police work gone tragically wrong. Unconscious knowledge is not the proverbial light bulb, he observes, but rather a flickering candle. Gladwell's groundbreaking explication of a key aspect of human nature is enlightening, provocative, and great fun to read. |
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Baker (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
It is absolutely amazing how much we take for granted about our abilities as human beings with an amazing brain and its capabilities. I think that I read this book in one night. I was drawn in by the stories and the science and experiments that offer support to the ideals that Gladwell writes about. This book really made me think about not thinking about everything (excuse the pun). I learned a lot about the unconscious mind and have learned to apply some of the ideals of this book to my life. |
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Ping Lim (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
This book questions if believing in scientific research or gut instinct is the right thing to do. The author talks candidly about his new Afro hairdo which brings him unwanted attention from the law, which questions if subconsciousness stereotypes our ethnicity. Blink questions if incidents such as Rodney King bashing by the police or the shooting of Diallo in front of his house are due to racism or due to our mind not functioning rationally when we have very little time space to spare. Subsequently, he questions if those "temporary insanity" is equivalent to people who has autism. Then, there are also discussions about food, drinks, and music tasting and how focus groups would have gotten them so wrong. The author continues to add that people know what they know when they like or dislike something but when they are told to justify why they like or dislike certain things, that's when things get pear-shaped. Does that mean just because we aren't able to justify things constructively, those results are proved less useful? We also then question if gut instinct is in fact a constructive symptom at the first place? There are also many illustrations about face reading, body reading and the author endeavors to justify that if we hone in our critical assessments of those subtle clues, maybe, we are able to "educate" our subconscious to discern certain situations and circumstances which ordinary people aren't able to pick up. This book is foremost thought-provoking and entices me to see things from a new dimension, or shall I say, a new paradigm shift. It's entertaining and highly enjoyable to read. Avid readers would appreciate that the author works with David Remnick who himself has written a few best sellers himself. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Blink is a revolutionary new way of looking at the way we view the world. We live in a world that teaches us to analyze things. A world that says in order to achieve, hard work is required, research is necessary before conclusions can be drawn. This book provides an alternative perspective. You can know a lot of information about a situation in a blink of an eye.
Malcolm Gladwell presents the concept of "thin slicing"; the act of filtering through a large amount of information to arrive at the truth. This book changes the way we understand all the decisions we make. The way we think is something that we have been taught but to truly be in the moment and see what is actually happening is a gift that this books offers.
Another book that I highly recommend is How to Create a Magical Relationship? by Ariel and Shya Kane. This book shows you ways to truly live in the moment. When you are in the moment you are available to see what is happening in any situation. When you are out of the moment your thoughts distract you from the moment which causes you to miss opportunities that you say you want. This book is great because no matter where you are in your life, it is always the perfect place to start to live in the moment. |
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Vedder (MSL quote), Belgium
<2006-12-30 00:00>
I thought that The Tipping Point was a decent book (4 stars), and I was much more interested in the subject matter of this one, but it was kinda disappointing. The individual stories he uses to illustrate his points are informative enough, I guess, but I really don't think he has any business drawing conclusions from any of it. Unfortunately he just doesn't have the expertise, he's only a writer. Still, I did read it all the way through, and got some interesting bits out of some of the experts he quotes. I got it from the library and am glad I didn't buy it. Gladwell has potential, but whereas Tipping Point was on par, this one is a bogey. |
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M. Lange (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
I like Malcolm Gladwell's prose style. It is elegant and smooth. It is a perfect balance to the seemingly ordinary cases he cites to pursue his thesis about how "thinking" is a lot more complicated than we believe, and how we can sharpen and control our powers of observation.
Good examples in the book are the instant awareness of "something wrong" with an allegedly genuine Greek sculpture later revealed to be a fake. The ability to instantly sense deviation from norms through experience and training is critical. Another example, among several others, is the study of facial expression as the key to understanding the feelings within, and how the face, if studied carefully, reveals what the person may be trying to conceal. Again, it is based on empirical study, and very focused attention, rather than intuition in the classical sense.
It is a mistake to hastily conclude that Gladwell is talking about "intuition" in the sense of arriving at conclusions based on inexplicable factors that are beyond the empirical, sensory way of gathering information. Some critics of Gladwell seem to miss this point and confuse one for the other. One who reads Blink will see he is talking about how the mind can instantaneously "know" the truth of a specific inquiry long before the rational processes of formal scientific method have a chance to confirm the rapid conclusion.
Over the period of gathering a lot of experience through focused attention, one can develop the ability to very quickly, based on a "thin slice" of new information, arrive at a sound judgment about meanings, behavior patterns, and other insights. He gives examples of how the trained observer can almost instantly "know" the wider truths that many others could not discern through far more study of the same "subject."
Perhaps what Gladwell is talking about could be called "holographic" knowledge, in that it is based on the theory that, like a hologram, one can see the whole of it through examining only a small portion that is emblematic of the whole. It is an accelerated form of pattern recognition, available to all who are willing to learn the patterns in a focused manner.
It is also not easy to explain how one knows what one knows in a "blink" of time. To rationally explain it can be confounding in itself. Still, it is part of who we are, how the human mind works.
Gladwell also shows how we can have our awareness and ability to accurately perceive things as they are, distorted by attention to other factors that obscure, confirm prejudices, and lead to erroneous conclusions. His example at the end of the book of the female trombone player being chosen by a German "traditional" orchestra through a screened audition is very telling. It captures the essence of the book.
I doubt that Gladwell was concerned with giving readers a comprehensive, academic study of the phenomena of learning, focused attention, and "adaptive subconscious" development. His endnotes are good for further study. By giving us this short, easy to read book, he introduces a new way of knowing to the general reader. In doing so, Gladwell has made a valuable contribution. |
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Roberta Cianetti (MSL quote), Italy
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Blink is about transcending what we think we know and trusting our inner self. It's about realizing that we take our life's most important decisions in an instant, in a blink of an eye.
Whenever we meet a new person, in fact, we acknowledge and decide we like or dislike him/her in less than 5 seconds. In that very moment, we are entirely guided by our unconscious and if only did we learn to listen to our purest, most recondite emotions, we would not be so surprised to discover, at a later stage, that what we thought of something or someone was not exactly right.
So many of our decisions are driven by the passionate desire to find a feasible solution, a hint, an answer. Yet, the more we dwell into the process of decision-making, the more we risk to make the wrong choice.
Blink revolutionalized the worldly wisdom that invites people to sleep over a problem before trying and face it. All in all, Malcolm Gladwell invites us not to think... At least, not the way we are used to, but start relying on and embracing the beautiful, infinite possibilities of our mind. |
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Jeddy (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
This is one of those books you read through with mild pleasure, only to realize at the end that the author's entire point could have been summed up quite well with one simple sentence. In this case, the sentence is: Trust your intuition, because it offers insights that logic can't.
That's certainly true. And the anecdotes and research Gladwell uses to support his thesis are entertaining, even if not all of them are as conclusive as he seems to think they are. But basically, this book is an somewhat belabored series of articles connected by the theme "Trust your intuition." If you already believe in the power of intuition and trust your ability to sometimes make snap judgments based on gut feelings seemingly without reason or research, then this book will be a fun little read, but you won't really learn anything new. If you believe intuition is a poor tool in decision-making, and you prefer to research everything into the ground and ignore gut feelings, then I doubt this book will convince you otherwise (but who knows?)
I bought this book because I'm studying improv, and my teacher recommended it. Improv requires snap decisions made without deliberation, and I was hoping this book would examine the transcendent state of suspension of deliberation that so many improv students have trouble achieving. How do you turn off your logical brain and react wisely without thinking? Sadly, Gladwell can't tell us how; I don't know whether anyone could. However, if you're interested in a more thorough and in-depth study of a closely related topic (how people can turn off the chattering parts of their brain and get into a groove where decisions come easily and without "thinking"), I very highly recommend Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow," one of the definitive works in the field.
Either way, buy Blink if you'd like some light airport reading. Don't expect anything very meaty, and don't expect any revelations.
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
Gladwell's well-written "Blink" is a series of descriptions of scientific studies that point to humans' ability to think without thinking. This entertaining and gripping book goes through study after fascinating study explaining how we can know things without really knowing things. "Blink" enlightens us about race relations, emotional recognition, how a doctor's tone of voice affects the likelihood that he'll be sued, and why America likes Tom Hanks. He also goes into how we humans can be primed to behave a certain way (such as act polite or impolite) a tendency I describe more thoroughly in my new book, "How to Take Advantage of The People Who Are Trying to Take Advantage of You." All of the author's stories lead to his simple point. Yes, we, as humans, have an uncanny ability predict things or know more than meets the eye, but this book leaves it there. It doesn't explain how to maximize our ability to think without thinking, nor does it paint a big-picture portrait of where that ability fits into all human behavior.
Gladwell mentions a vital point near the beginning of the book: the brain does some things without letting our conscious mind become aware of it. This basic understanding of the world happens so fast and effortlessly, that much of the time, we don't know it's going on. It turns out that our brain is really good at pattern recognition. Hawkins' On Intelligence goes further into this fascinating ability. Those two books in conjunction with Wisdom of Crowds, by Surowiecki, and "Stumbling On Happiness," by Gilbert, reveal a pattern in themselves: there's a lot to learn about how we humans use our brains.
This book is an easy must-read, but is even better when followed by other great books.
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A. Knepper (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-30 00:00>
While Malcolm Gladwell's first book-length offering The Tipping Point, offered a few redeeming qualities from it's spectacularly non- groundbreaking ideas, Blink has nothing to offer people who have at least taken a high school psychology class.
In one respect, Mr. Gladwell has performed a great public service: he has exposed the media as being full of dupes, willing to glorify anything in the field of non-fiction that presents a psychological theory, even an amazingly unoriginal one. As in Gladwell's first tome, Blink is a promoter of Freudian concepts - an unconscious mind that has a greater influence over us than we're aware of, etc. Blink is a 280 page voyage through anecdotes that do absolutely nothing to bolster his claim.
Let's take a public example. On Wikipedia, there is a summary of a story from Blink posted: "A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn't. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, 'There's something wrong here,' and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP, which of course it wasn't. What is interesting to Gladwell is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From what Gladwell calls 'the locked box' in our brains, our fireman just 'blinked' and made the right decision. In fact, if the fireman had deliberated on the facts he was seeing, he would have likely lost his life and the lives of his men."
Perhaps the fireman knew that there was something wrong because normally the fire should have abated? Perhaps the fireman was so frazzled by the incident that he couldn't put all of his thoughts together at once? And maybe his gut reaction could have been wrong, too - but it wasn't, so that's a non-story, and Gladwell wouldn't have material for this book that way. Day after day, gut reactions and first impressions are wrong, which could also fill up a book, but that doesn't make for an interesting read. I don't feel as if I can make this point as strongly as it deserves - the floor might not have fallen through. His first impression might have been wrong. First impressions are wrong all the time. That, however, is a boring concept, and wouldn't make a best-seller. It would also require Gladwell to do some real research.
Another anecdote that sticks out in my mind: Gladwell claims that if I were sitting in his office, and he read words such as Florida, denchers, Bingo, etc., to me, I would have walked out of his office slower than I came in because my "unconscious mind" equated those words with being elderly, so I would have assumed the role of an elderly person, whether I was aware of it or not. Oh, would I have? "Malcolm said so. That's enough evidence for me," said the gulliable Gladwell fan. Even assuming I were to walk out slower, there are more factors than a few words that he said to me throughout the course of our conversation, which would have to carefully controlled, by his theory, to make sure he didn't say things such as "high school" "teenager" or "rock music" because then I would have assumed the role of a teenager, walking out of the room faster, whether I knew it or not, neutralizing the elderly feeling.
This is so ridiculous that I feel stupid even trying to debunk Gladwell's claims. This should be obvious even to the most uneducated reader - there is more than one factor involved in everything. (I'm trying not to impart my own cognitive psychological bias into this - I'm willing to read serious works about psychoanalysis. Gladwell's book is not serious! No one who ignores factors that may diminish their argument should be taken seriously.)
Theory is fact to Gladwell, the King of Pop Psychology, two books in a row. Maybe he "unconsciously" knows that it's wrong.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.)
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1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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